Analysis of the scientific literature's abstract writing style and citations

Abstract

PurposeThe citation counts are an important indicator of scholarly impact. The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between citations of scientific articles and writing styles of abstracts in papers and capture the characteristics of highly cited papers' abstracts.Design/methodology/approachThis research selected 10,000 highly cited papers and 10,000 zero-cited papers from the WOS (2008-2017) database. The Coh-Metrix 3.0 textual cohesion analysis tool was used to quantify the 108 language features of highly cited and zero-cited paper abstracts. The differences of the indicators with significant differences were analyzed from four aspects: vocabulary, sentence, syntax and readability.FindingsThe abstracts of highly cited papers contain more complex and professional words, more adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and personal pronouns, but fewer nouns and verbs. The sentences in the abstracts of highly cited papers are more complex and the sentence length is relatively longer. The syntactic structure in abstracts of highly cited papers is relatively more complex and syntactic similarities between sentences are fewer. Highly cited papers' abstracts are less readable than zero-cited papers' abstracts.Originality/valueThis study analyses the differences between the abstracts of highly cited and those of zero-cited papers, reveals the common external and deep semantic features of highly cited papers in abstract writing styles, provide suggestions for researchers on abstract writing. These findings can help increase the scientific impact of articles and improve the review efficiency as well as the researchers' abstract writing skills.

Can ChatGPT be used to predict citation counts, readership, and social media interaction? An exploration among 2222 scientific abstracts

“…Prior research has predominantly relied on techniques such as string searches, sentiment analysis, and linguistic complexity analysis (e.g., Hassan et al, 2020;Sienkiewicz & Altmann, 2016). For example, Hu et al (2021) examined the association between citation counts of scientific articles and the writing styles of abstracts. Their analysis revealed that abstracts of highly cited papers had a more complex vocabulary, longer sentences, and more complex syntactic structures, and were less readable than uncited abstracts.…”

Factors associating with or predicting more cited or higher quality journal articles: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…In more detail, for 10,000 highly cited and 10,000 uncited English language research articles published during 2008-2017 across 22 subject areas, abstracts of highly cited articles contained more complex, difficult, and professional terms. The highly cited articles also had more adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and personal pronouns and longer sentences, making them less readable compared with abstracts of uncited articles (Hu et al, 2021). For 71,628 abstracts from language and linguistics journals (1991 to 2020), abstract readability was low and decreasing over time, and the readability of abstracts negatively correlated with citation counts (Wang et al, 2022).…”